On Friday, X-COM co-creator Julian Gollop broke the news that he's remaking his ZX Spectrum classic Chaos, and we were too busy doing a dance about his return to PC strategy games to think about how , why , when or which . Now that the dust has settled, Julian has set up a new blog to answer some of these questions, his first post revealing why he's bringing Chaos back after so many years.
"The main reason is that the game was very popular with its players," Gollop explains, "despite its many flaws, quirky bugs and poor graphics. So the logical thing to do is to try to improve it and bring it up to date with today's technology." It's also game that has "some traction", thanks to it being the cover tape for Your Sinclair magazine on a couple of occasions.
He still thinks Chaos was a "great multiplayer experience" with "great replay value because of its random, chaotic nature. No two games will turn out the same, and most of your plans and strategies won't play out exactly the way you envisaged them." He goes on to praise the random element in games - something Ubisoft, his former employers, weren't overly fond of.
"Many of my colleagues in Ubisoft would often say that they don't like randomness - they want more determinant decision making based more on skill than on luck. However, randomness does inject a fair dose of tension and fun into a game. It also means that you have rarely, deterministically lost a game before it is over. In Chaos there is usually everything to play for."
Gollop left Ubisoft in March, "ostensibly on six month paternity leave to help my wife look after our twin babies". He decided that he wanted to stay at home with his family for longer, "so now I am on my own, working in my bedroom, just like I did all those years ago when I was coding in Z80 assembly language on my 48k ZX Spectrum."
Except now he's using Unity, and Chaos is going to be in 3D. We'll be keeping an eye on Gollop Games for future developments, and we suggest that you do the same.
